New NVIDIA Shield Portable leaked in FCC filing

NVIDIA looks to be gearing up to launch a new Shield Portable. The device has been leaked in an FCC filing just one week after NVIDIA announced its latest Shield TV box at CES 2017 in Las Vegas — and it promises some impressive specifications.

The original Shield Portable was the ultimate portable for mobile gamers. It combined a touchscreen with an Xbox-like physical control pad that allowed players to enjoy the latest Android games alongside physical buttons and sticks.

It’s hard to get hold of the Shield Portable now because NVIDIA no longer sells it, and the absence of a new model at CES suggested the company had given up on the device. But a finding from Reddit user “k2kevin” tells us that’s not the case.

The new model looks identical to the original in NVIDIA’s FCC filing, but its insides have been upgraded. The Shield Portable 2 is powered by a Tegra X1 processor, 802.11ac Wi-Fi for better game streaming, and a sharper 5-inch display with a 1440 x 810 resolution.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that the Shield Portable 2 will ever arrive. But the fact that NVIDIA has gotten as far as an FCC filing suggests it certainly has plans to launch the device relatively soon in the United States.